Gary Brandt delivers his most intimate and contemplative chapter yet in this beautifully melancholic story of solitude and longing from The Dimension Of Mind Dot Com, where Sally finds herself virtually alone in the peaceful but eerily quiet domain of Penny Lake, struggling with the boredom of near-immortal existence while her entire family—including daughters Penelope and Anahere who became legendary leaders—has gone to rebuild physical Earth, leaving her to process the profound emptiness that comes after fulfilling a cosmic mission when everyone you love has moved on to their next adventure.
The genius emerges through Brandt's perfect balance of frontier history and metaphysical storytelling: the haunting 1892 poem by Susannah Williams about prairie sod houses becomes a poetic bridge connecting the hardships of 19th-century homesteaders with the modern challenges facing Sally's daughters as they literally rebuild civilization from scratch, while Sally's detailed account of the re-population process—100 groups of 100 people each, selected for genetic diversity and survival skills, transformed naked into level 3 reality to start over with nothing but knowledge and determination—reveals the massive scope of this restoration project and the incredible sacrifices required from families who send their children into an unknown future.
What makes this chapter so compelling is how Sally's storytelling to Alexa and Penny becomes both historical documentation and emotional processing, as she works through the complex feelings of watching her daughters evolve from eternal 33-year-olds into aging pioneer women raising families in harsh conditions, while mysterious orb sightings hint at interdimensional connections that may allow the separated family members to briefly glimpse each other across the barriers between level 5 ethereal existence and level 3 physical reality.
But the real emotional earthquake unfolds through Alexa's desperate desire to join her family on Earth despite Sally's wise explanations about why such transitions must be carefully limited, creating a profound meditation on the painful necessity of letting go even when you have the power to maintain connections that might ultimately prevent healthy evolution and growth for both dimensions.
The chapter's deepest wisdom emerges through Sally's explanation of temporal mechanics—how 12,000 years of physical time compressed into 97 years of experienced time through repetitive existence, until planetary restoration re-synchronized the dimensional clocks—while her revelation that she's been visiting Earth as an invisible 'orb' until her family asked her to stop demonstrates both the lengths love will go to maintain connection and the mature recognition that sometimes the most loving act is respecting boundaries even when it breaks your heart.
Brandt masterfully escalates both the practical realities and emotional complexity when Sally describes how John's family's arrival as naked refugees disrupted Penelope's established community, creating sexual tensions and resource challenges that reveal how even the most well-intentioned family reunions can become complicated when people have grown in different directions, while the chapter's closing hint that the mysterious orbs Sally's been seeing might actually be her Earth family trying to connect back suggests that love truly does find a way across any barrier, even when conscious contact is impossible.
The chapter ends with perfect bittersweet resonance as Sally treasures her locket photographs of a 14-year-old Penelope while processing the surreal experience of watching your eternal child become an aging grandmother, making this both an epic exploration of interdimensional family dynamics and an achingly beautiful meditation on how sometimes the deepest love means accepting separation, trusting that the connections that matter most transcend physical presence, and finding peace in knowing that the people you've loved across lifetimes are exactly where they need to be, even when that place is impossibly far from where you are.